Letter from Elias Higbee, 20 February 1840–A

When conflict first broke out between Missourians and the Saints in summer 1833, non-Mormons in Jackson County, Missouri, presented church leaders with a declaration outlining their grievances against the Saints. Reprinted in the first pages of Pratt’s pamphlet, the declaration deemed the Missouri Saints “deluded fanatics” because they claimed “to hold personal communion and converse, face to face, with the most high God—to receive communications and revelations direct from Heaven—to heal the sick by laying on hands—and in short, to perform all the wonder working miracles wraught by the inspired Apostles and prophets of old.” The declaration also accused the Saints of being “the very dregs of society” because of their poverty and their alleged attempts to foment slave rebellions. (Pratt, History of the Late Persecution, 7–10.)  

Orrin Porter Rockwell, Affidavit, 3 Feb. 1840, Record Group 233, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, National Archives, Washington DC. While in Washington DC, Rockwell provided an affidavit stating that vigilantes told him and his father that they would be permitted to remain living in the county unharmed if they would “renounce their doctrine and religious faith as Mormons.”  

Record Group 233, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives / Petitions and Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures, and Related Documents Which Were Referred to the Committee on Judiciary during the 27th Congress. Committee on the Judiciary, Petitions and Memorials, 1813–1968. Record Group 233, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1789–2015. National Archives, Washington DC. The LDS records cited herein are housed in National Archives boxes 40 and 41 of Library of Congress boxes 139–144 in HR27A-G10.1.

This possibly refers to Uriah B. Powell’s affidavit, in which Powell claimed that a militia captain told him that the militia had “designs of getting the Mormons out of the State.” This affidavit, however, did not explicitly list religious faith as the primary motive. Powell swore his affidavit before James Adams on 9 November 1839 while Higbee was in Springfield, Illinois, making it highly likely that Higbee carried this affidavit to the capital and that it was included among those submitted with the memorial to the committee. (Uriah B. Powell, Affidavit, Springfield, IL, 9 Nov. 1839, Record Group 233, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, National Archives, Washington DC.)  

Record Group 233, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives / Petitions and Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures, and Related Documents Which Were Referred to the Committee on Judiciary during the 27th Congress. Committee on the Judiciary, Petitions and Memorials, 1813–1968. Record Group 233, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1789–2015. National Archives, Washington DC. The LDS records cited herein are housed in National Archives boxes 40 and 41 of Library of Congress boxes 139–144 in HR27A-G10.1.

“The documents” likely refers to the collection of documents the church delegation intended to publish and publicly distribute, including their memorial to Congress and the affidavits that accompanied it. (See Memorial to the United States Senate and House of Representatives, ca. 30 Oct. 1839–27 Jan. 1840; and Letter from Elias Higbee, 24 Mar. 1840.)  

Robert Lucas, Iowa Territory, to Alanson Ripley, 4 Jan. 1840, in Times and Seasons, Jan. 1840, 1:40. The January 1840 issue of the Times and Seasons published the letter from Iowa territorial governor Lucas to Ripley, one of the church’s bishops. In the letter, Lucas reported that church members in northern Ohio had been “considered an industrious, inoffensive people” and stated that he had “no recollection of ever having heard, in that State of their being charged with violating the laws of the country.” Lucas also added that the Mormon families who had recently relocated to his territory were “generally considered industrious, inoffensive and worthy citizens.”  

Times and Seasons. Commerce/Nauvoo, IL. Nov. 1839–Feb. 1846.

Higbee may have been referring to one of Young’s legal clerks or to the clerk of Pike County, Illinois.  

On 30 October 1838, more than two hundred vigilantes attacked a group of church members living at the Hawn’s Mill settlement on Shoal Creek in Caldwell County, Missouri. Seventeen church members died as a result of this attack. The two boys killed in the massacre were Charles Merrick, age nine, and Sardius Smith, age ten. The memorial contained an account of the massacre at Hawn’s Mill, as did the pamphlets compiled by Pratt and John P. Greene. Several of the affidavits sent to Congress described the conflict as well, but it is unclear which affidavits the Senate Committee on the Judiciary had in their possession at this time. (Baugh, “Call to Arms,” chap. 9 and appendixes I–J; Memorial to the United States Senate and House of Representatives, ca. 30 Oct. 1839–27 Jan. 1840; Pratt, History of the Late Persecution, 50–51; Greene, Facts relative to the Expulsion, 21–24.)  

Baugh, Alexander L. “A Call to Arms: The 1838 Mormon Defense of Northern Missouri.” PhD diss., Brigham Young University, 1996. Also available as A Call to Arms: The 1838 Mormon Defense of Northern Missouri, Dissertations in Latter-day Saint History (Provo, UT: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History; BYU Studies, 2000).

Greene, John P. Facts Relative to the Expulsion of the Mormons or Latter Day Saints, from the State of Missouri, under the “Exterminating Order.” By John P. Greene, an Authorized Representative of the Mormons. Cincinnati: R. P. Brooks, 1839.

During the 1830s and 1840s, several debates ensued in the United States over the power of the federal government to enforce the Bill of Rights on individual states. In 1833 the Supreme Court ruled that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. Then, in 1845, the Supreme Court ruled that the Bill of Rights did not protect religious liberty from infringement by state or municipal governments. Although this latter case postdates the church’s petitioning efforts in 1840, it demonstrates that JS, Higbee, and Rigdon were not the only Americans questioning the extent of federal power to ensure religious liberty in individual states. Higbee seems to suggest here that even if the federal government did not have power to protect church members’ rights to religious freedom under the First Amendment, the government should not be constitutionally restrained from intervening when a state drives thousands of citizens off their land and out of state borders. (Barron v. Baltimore, 7 Peters 243 [1833]; Permoli v. Municipality No. 1, 3 Howard 589 [1845]; Sehat, Myth of American Religious Freedom, 4; McBride, “When Joseph Smith Met Martin Van Buren,” 157–158.)  

Peters / Peters, Richard. Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States. 17 vols. Various publishers, 1828–1843.

Howard / Howard, Benjamin C. Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States. 25 vols. Various publishers. 1843–1860.

Sehat, David. The Myth of American Religious Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

McBride, Spencer W. Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017.

Church leaders had previously addressed allegations that they directed church members to steal from their neighbors or to willfully act against Missouri laws. After some church members organized into militia companies in October 1838 and attacked settlements that harbored anti-Mormon vigilantes, they defended their appropriation of corn, hogs, and other goods and livestock as being in keeping with generally accepted practices of war. (Foote, Autobiography, 30; Petition to George Tompkins, between 9 and 15 Mar. 1839; Bill of Damages, 4 June 1839.)  

Foote, Warren. Autobiography, not before 1903. Warren Foote, Papers, 1837–1941. CHL. MS 1123, fd. 1.